Top Retailers Sending Spam to Consumers

As per a study by Spam Ratings a spam research company, when 100 reputed UK brands sent e-mails during the last 6-months they included household names such as Arcadia Group, Aldi, JD Sports, B&Q, Woolworths and PC World that had dispatched the greatest number of unsolicited e-mails.

Also, British Airways and Boots were two of the 13 brands, which violated best practices for e-mailing via forcefully making consumers to opt for accepting e-mails from intermediary sources.

Revealed Spam Ratings, website-generated spam had increased 110% from October 2009. Two in 5 messages carrying malware included sex-related or pharma-related content. 35% of the spam associated with finance, and 15% were spoofed e-mails, which phished on legitimate websites for the login credentials of users. What's more, 51% of the sellers dispatched mass e-mails, which didn't have users' approval, the study showed.

Furthermore according to the study, 44% of the retailers examined made customers opt for accepting e-mails, in an automatic manner, whether or not they willingly signed up for them. 56% of the electronic mails that the 100 most reputed retailers sent were not driven from explicit consumer request.

Additionally, the study also discovered that after the ordinary Web-surfer opted for the Arcadia Group's privately-owned garment sellers in UK namely Dorothy Perkins, Burtons, Miss Selfridge, Evans, Wallis, Topshop and Top Man, he got 394 spam mails, which didn't have his explicit request during the 6-months.

Co-founder Andy Yates of Spam Ratings stated that brands which had people's trust were committing a great error in not acting in a responsible way, or being fair and transparent with consumers. Enterprises invested millions in developing reputation and then appeared to spoil it via the dispatch of massive volumes of unsolicited e-mails, he noted. Newsmediaage reported this on October 22, 2010.

Furthermore, Yates stated that spam could be described as a dangerous and horrible disease which had become an epidemic across U.K. PCAdvisor reported this on October 22, 2010. The disease had propagated via Internet sites as the key source, with far many of them selling databases to 3rd-parties and thereby fueling the massive rise in uninvited e-mails, Yates added.